This article is about the work by Margaret Cavendish. For the 2021 horror-thriller film loosely based on it, see The Blazing World (film). For the Siri Hustvedt novel, see Siri Hustvedt.
The Blazing World
Title page of Margaret Cavendish's The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, reprinted 1668 [originally published 1666]
The North Pole, where the pasageway in the story is located.
As its full title suggests, Blazing World is a fanciful depiction of a satirical, utopian kingdom in another world (with different stars in the sky) that can be reached via the North Pole. According to novelist Steven H. Propp, it is "the only known work of utopian fiction by a woman in the 17th century, as well as an example of what we now call 'proto-science fiction' — although it is also a romance, an adventure story, and even autobiography."[3]
The Blazing World opens with a sonnet written by the author's husband, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which celebrates her imaginative powers. The sonnet was followed by a letter to the reader written by Margaret Cavendish herself. In the letter to the reader, Cavendish divides Blazing World into three parts. The first part being “romancical”, the second “philosophical”, and the third “fancy” or “fantastical”.[4] She also explains the joint publishing of Blazing World with the more intellectual Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy.
The first “romancical” section describes a young woman from the Kingdom of ESFI (an acronym for England, Scotland, France, and Ireland) being kidnapped onto a boat by a spurned lover. The gods, unsatisfied by the kidnapping, blow the boat to the North Pole, where all of the crew except the young woman die of hypothermia. The ship floats into a parallel world populated by talking animal-human hybrids, the "Blazing World". The strange young woman is worshipped as a goddess, despite her pleas that she is mortal, and is made Empress of the Blazing World.
The second “philosophical” section describes the Empress' knowledge and interest in the natural sciences and philosophy. She consults on these matters with a variety of human-animal hybrids, each group of which is specialized in a specific field. She praises some of these guild-like groups, and chastises others. She also imposes a new religion onto the Blazing World. Homesick, she consults immaterial spirits to tell her news from home, and enlists their assistance to write her own Cabbala. The spirits suggest the Duchess of Newcastle to be the best scribe for the project.
The final "fantastical" section begins as the Empress and Duchess become close friends over the writing of the Cabbala. They visit England together, with the Empress' soul inhabiting the Duchess' body, and the Duchess solicits help from Fortune for her unlucky husband. In the Blazing World, the Duchess mounts an impassioned defense of her husband at a court hearing with the virtues, although the outcome of the legal process is inconclusive. The Duchess departs the Blazing World for her home, and advises the Empress to return the Blazing World to its original balance.
When the spirits inform the Empress that ESFI has been destroyed in war, the Empress and the Duchess reunite to plan an invasion of ESFI. The Empress clothes herself in gemstones and invades with fantastical technologies. The armies of ESFI think her an angel, and the Empress compels them to return power to ESFI's righteous King. The Empress and the Duchess have one last extended conversation, and depart to their respective homes. The Empress returns the Blazing World to its original harmony, without her implemented religion.
Finally, Cavendish ends Blazing World with an Epilogue to the Reader. In this Epilogue she describes her reasons for writing The Blazing World. She compares creating The Blazing World to the conquests of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.[5]
The work was initially published as a companion piece to Cavendish's Observations upon Experimental Philosophy[6] and thus functioned as an imaginative component to what was otherwise a reasoned endeavor in 17th-century science. It was reprinted in 1668.[6]
Genre and implications
Scholar Nicole Pohl of Oxford Brookes University has argued that Cavendish was accurate in her categorisation of the work as "a 'hermaphroditic' text". Pohl points to Cavendish's confrontations of seventeenth century norms, with regard to such categories as science, politics, gender, and identity. Pohl argues that her willingness to question society's conceptions while discussing topics that were considered in her era best left to male minds, allows her to escape into an exceptional gender-neutral discussion of said topics, creating what Pohl labels, "a truly emancipatory poetic space."[7]
Northeastern University professor Marina Leslie remarks that readers have noted that The Blazing World serves as a departure from the habitually male-dominated field of utopian writing. While some readers and critics may interpret Cavendish's work as being restricted by these characteristics of the genre of utopia, Leslie suggests approaching interpretations of the work while remembering Cavendish as one of the first, more outspoken feminists in history, and especially in early writing. Leslie contends that in this sense, Cavendish utilised the utopian genre to discuss issues such as "female nature and authority" in a new light, while simultaneously expanding the utopian genre itself.[8]
Dr. Delilah Bermudez Brataas elaborates on utopias' impact on gender and sexuality in her thesis for Tufts University. She points out that initially, utopias were sexually fluid worlds. Therefore, they challenged gender conventions. Cavendish's Blazing World demonstrates how sexual and gender-fluid these spaces are, mainly when women write them. Brataas elaborates on this statement further and describes the genre's appeal in earlier times. This period, combined with gender conventions at the time, makes utopia an appealing genre for Cavendish. Utopias offer women a space that can be primarily feminine and makes them feel empowered. Writing a utopia offered Cavendish the opportunity to create a world of her own, one over which she has complete agency and no limits. In her epigraph, Cavendish even reminds the reader that she owns this world and suggests that they are unwelcome and should create their own if they dislike it. Brataas points out how her decisions when building this world reflect her gender ideals, such as spaces for women's education and women as independent figures and authorities.[9]
Leslie also believes that The Blazing World incorporates many different genres, "which include not only travel narrative and romance but also utopia, epic, biography, cabbala, Lucianic fable, Menippean satire, natural history, and morality play, among others…”[10] Oddvar Holmesland of University of Edinburgh agrees that The Blazing World is creative in its genres, writing that "the term 'hybridisation' aptly captures Cavendish's method of blending established genres and categories into a new order, and of presenting her fantasy empire as versimilar."[11]
University of Georgia professor Sujata Iyengar points out the importance of the fact that The Blazing World is clearly fictional, a stark contrast to the scientific nature of the work it is attached to. Iyengar notes that writing a work of fiction allowed Cavendish to create a new world in which she could conceive of any possible reality. Such liberty, Iyengar argues, allows Cavendish to explore ideas of rank, gender, and race that directly clash with commonly held beliefs about servility in her era. Iyengar goes as far to say that Cavendish's newfound liberty within fictional worlds provides her an opportunity to explore ideas that directly conflict with those that Cavendish writes about in her nonfiction writing.[12]
Jason H. Pearl of Florida International University considers The Blazing World as one of the earliest examples of the novel, "adding the modifier 'early'...to indicate a period in the novel's history when experimentation was more common, when strange incidents conveyed in strange ways could be expected from prose fiction." Pearl also believes it to contain an "interaction and opposition between two tributary forms: the lunar voyage, a subgenre of utopian writing, and natural philosophy, which helped inform notions of possibility and plausibility in representations of the natural world." However, Pearl also considers it "a revision to the lunar voyage ... one of its revisions is to pull the destination earthward, literally and figuratively, making its various possibilities of difference somehow more accessible."[13]
The University of Memphis professor Catherine Gimelli Martin compares The Blazing World to another early example of the genre: Thomas More’s Utopia. She describes Cavendish’s focus as knowledge, whereas More’s is money. Unlike More, Cavendish uses gold in her world as a tool for decoration yet devalues it entirely otherwise. Additionally, she forbids commoners from using gold at all. Martin suggests that in TheBlazing World, this class system eliminates any competition for gold like that seen and discussed in More’s Utopia.[14]
World
Jason Pearl has commented on the surrealism of the world, as well as (paradoxically) its similarity to our own. He writes, “The Lady’s experience is described as ‘so strange an adventure,’ in ‘so strange a place, and amongst such wonderful kind of creatures,’ ‘none like any of our world’...It seems anything is possible here,” and that, “near as it is, the Blazing World boasts a multitude of otherworldly marvels," but also believes that "the interstitial passageway exists as a wrinkle in space, a connecting disconnection that permits the Blazing World’s narrow reachability and legitimises its radical differences.”[13] By "interstitial passageway," Pearl is referring to the unseen, unexplained path the protagonist and her captors traverse in the beginning of the story to reach the Blazing World.
Political views
Throughout The Blazing World, the Empress asserts that a peaceful society can only be attained through the lack of societal divisions. To eliminate potential division and maintain social harmony in the society the text imagines, Cavendish constructs a monarchical government.[15] Unlike a democratic government, Cavendish believes only an absolute sovereignty can maintain social unity and stability because the reliance on one authority eliminates separations of power.[16] To further justify the monarchical government, Cavendish draws upon philosophical and religious arguments. She writes, "it was natural for one body to have one head, so it was also natural for a politic body to have but one governor … besides, said they, a monarchy is a divine form of government, and agrees most with our religion."[17]
Cavendish's political views are similar to those of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In his 1651 book, Leviathan, Hobbes famously upholds the notion that a monarchical government is a necessary force in preventing societal instability and "ruin",[15] As a notable contemporary of Cavendish, Hobbes' influence on her political philosophy is apparent.[18] In The Blazing World, Cavendish even directly mentions his name while cataloguing famous writers: "Galileo, Gassendus, Descartes, Helmont, Hobbes, H. More, etc".[19]
Influence
Blazing World was originally published as a conjoined text along with Cavendish's Observations on Experimental Philosophy, which was a direct response to scientist Robert Hooke's Micrographia which was published only a year before. Advances in the field of science and philosophy in the early modern period had a huge influence on Cavendish and were a major component of The Descriptions of a New World, Called the Blazing World.[20] This influence can be seen directly in Blazing World, with nearly half the book consisting of descriptions of the Blazing World, its people, philosophies, and inventions. One of these inventions is a microscope, which Cavendish critiques alongside the experimental method itself in the Blazing World.[21] This integration of scientific advances could be one of the reasons Blazing World is considered by some to be the first sci-fi novel.
In Alan Moore's graphic novels chronicling the adventures of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Blazing World was identified as the self-same idyllic realm from which the extra-dimensional traveller Christian, a member of the first League led by Duke Prospero, had come in the late 1680s. The league disbanded when Christian returned to this realm, and it was to where Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel also departed many years later.
In China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, a library book entitled A London Guide for the Blazing Worlders is mentioned, suggesting that travel between the two worlds is not all one-way.
In 2014, Siri Hustvedt published the novel The Blazing World, in which she describes Harriet Burden's brilliant but convoluted attempts at gaining recognition from the male-dominated New York City art scene. Hustvedt has Burden refer to Margaret Cavendish as a rich source of inspiration at many occasions. Nearing the end of her life, Burden is comforted by Cavendish's work: "I am back to my blazing mother Margaret" (p.348), she writes in her notebook.
In 2021, Carlson Young released the film The Blazing World, which she directed, co-wrote, and starred in. The film's credits state that it is "inspired by Margaret Cavendish and other dreams".[22]
↑ Khanna, Lee Cullen. "The Subject of Utopia: Margaret Cavendish and Her Blazing-World." Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: World of Difference. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994. 15–34.
↑ Steven H. Propp, Utopia on the 6th Floor: Work, Death, and Taxes — Part 2, Bloomington, IN, iUniverse, 2004; p. 383.
1 2 Cavendish, Margaret (2016). The description of a new world, called the blazing world. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. p.21. ISBN9781554812424.
↑ Clucas, Stephen (2003). A princely brave woman: essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Ashgate. ISBN0754604640. OCLC49240098.
↑ LESLIE, MARINA (1996). "Gender, Genre and the Utopian Body in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World". Utopian Studies. 7 (1): 6–24. JSTOR20719470.
↑ Leslie, Marina. "Mind the Map: Fancy, Matter, and World Construction in Margaret Cavendish's "Blazing World"". Renaissance and Reformation.
↑ Holmesland, Oddvar. "Margaret Cavendish's Anthropocene Worlds". New Literary History.
↑ Iyengar, Sujata (2002-09-01). "Royalist, Romancist, Racialist: Rank, Gender, and Race in the Science and Fiction of Margaret Cavendish". ELH. 69 (3): 649–672. doi:10.1353/elh.2002.0027. ISSN1080-6547. S2CID162125904.
1 2 Pearl, Jason H. (2014). Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel. University of Virginia Press.
↑ Boyle, Deborah. "Fame, Virtue, and Government: Margaret Cavendish on Ethics and Politics." Journal of the History of Ideas. University of Pennsylvania Press, 22 May 2006. Web. 02 June 2017.
↑ Cavendish, Margaret (1994). The Blazing World & Other Writings. Penguin Classics. p.134. ISBN9780140433722.
↑ Duncan, Stewart (2012-01-01). "Debating Materialism: Cavendish, Hobbes, and More". History of Philosophy Quarterly. 29 (4): 391–409. JSTOR43488051.
↑ Cavendish, Margaret (1994). The Blazing World & Other Writings. Penguin Classics. p.181. ISBN9780140433722.
Feminist science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction focused on such feminist themes as: gender inequality, sexuality, race, economics, reproduction, and environment. Feminist SF is political because of its tendency to critique the dominant culture. Some of the most notable feminist science fiction works have illustrated these themes using utopias to explore a society in which gender differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, or dystopias to explore worlds in which gender inequalities are intensified, thus asserting a need for feminist work to continue.
Science fiction and fantasy serve as important vehicles for feminist thought, particularly as bridges between theory and practice. No other genres so actively invite representations of the ultimate goals of feminism: worlds free of sexism, worlds in which women's contributions are recognized and valued, worlds that explore the diversity of women's desire and sexuality, and worlds that move beyond gender.
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American author. She is best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. Her work was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".
The Dispossessed is a 1974 anarchist utopian science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, one of her seven Hainish Cycle novels. It is one of a small number of books to win all three Hugo, Locus and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. It achieved a degree of literary recognition unusual for science fiction due to its exploration of themes such as anarchism and revolutionary societies, capitalism, utopia, individualism, and collectivism.
Utopian and dystopian fiction are subgenres of science fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. Some novels combine both genres, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other types of speculative fiction.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a prolific English philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction writer and playwright. She produced more than 12 original literary works, many of which became well known due to her high social status, which allowed Margaret to meet and converse with some of the most important and influential minds of her time.
Joshua Barnes FRS, was an English scholar. His work Gerania; a New Discovery of a Little Sort of People, anciently discoursed of, called Pygmies (1675) was an Utopian romance.
Woman on the Edge of Time is a 1976 novel by American writer Marge Piercy. It is considered a classic of utopian speculative science fiction as well as a feminist classic. The novel was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf. Piercy draws on several inspirations to write this novel such as utopian studies, technoscience, socialization, and female fantasies. One of Piercy's main inspirations for her utopian novels is Plato's Republic. Piercy describes the novel as, "if only…" Piercy even compares Woman on the Edge of Time and another one of her utopian novels He, She, and It when discussing the themes and inspirations behind it.
Gender has been an important theme explored in speculative fiction. The genres that make up speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, supernatural fiction, horror, superhero fiction, science fantasy and related genres, have always offered the opportunity for writers to explore social conventions, including gender, gender roles, and beliefs about gender. Like all literary forms, the science fiction genre reflects the popular perceptions of the eras in which individual creators were writing; and those creators' responses to gender stereotypes and gender roles.
Feminist literature is fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry, which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing, and defending equal civil, political, economic, and social rights for women. It often addresses the roles of women in society particularly as regarding status, privilege, and power – and generally portrays the consequences to women, men, families, communities, and societies as undesirable.
Imaginary voyage is a narrative genre which presents fictious locations in the form of a travel narrative, but has no generally agreed-upon definition. It has been subdivided into fantastic voyages and realistic voyages depending on the prominence of "marvelous or supernatural elements". It can be a utopian or satirical representation put into a fictional frame of travel account. It has been regarded as a predecessor of science fiction.
A dystopia, also called a cacotopia or anti-utopia, is a community or society that is extremely bad or frightening. It is often treated as an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence, and poverty. The relationship between utopia and dystopia is in actuality, not one of simple opposition, as many dystopias claim to be utopias and vice versa.
The role of women in speculative fiction has changed a great deal since the early to mid-20th century. There are several aspects to women's roles, including their participation as authors of speculative fiction and their role in science fiction fandom. Regarding authorship, in 1948, 10–15% of science fiction writers were female. Women's role in speculative fiction has grown since then, and in 1999, women comprised 36% of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's professional members. Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley has been called the first science fiction novel, although women wrote utopian novels even before that, with Margaret Cavendish publishing the first in the seventeenth century. Early published fantasy was written by and for any gender. However, speculative fiction, with science fiction in particular, has traditionally been viewed as a male-oriented genre.
The Convent of Pleasure is a comedic play first published by Margaret Cavendish in 1668. It tells the story of Lady Happy, a noblewoman who chooses to reject marriage in favor of creating a community - the titular “convent” - in which she and other women of noble birth can live free from the constraints of patriarchy. Like much of Cavendish's fiction, it explores utopian ideals and questions the expected roles of women in 17th-century English society.
The Welbeck Academy or Welbeck Circle is a name that has been given to the loose intellectual grouping around William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the first half of the 17th century. It takes its name from Welbeck Abbey, a country house in Nottinghamshire that was a Cavendish family seat. Another term used is Newcastle Circle. The geographical connection is, however, more notional than real; and these terms have been regarded also as somewhat misleading. Cavendish was Viscount Mansfield in 1620, and moved up the noble ranks to Duke, step by step; "Newcastle" applies by 1628.
This is a timeline of philosophy in the 17th century.
Emma L. E. Rees is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Chester.
"The Matter of Seggri" is a science fiction novelette by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. It was first published in 1994 in the third issue of Crank!, a science fiction – fantasy anthology, and has since been printed in number of other publications. In 2002, it was published in Le Guin's collection of short stories The Birthday of the World: and Other Stories. "The Matter of Seggri" won the Otherwise Award in 1994 for exploring "gender-bending" and has been nominated for other honors including the Nebula Award.
Terra Ignota is a quartet of science fiction and philosophical novels by the American author Ada Palmer. The series consists of Too Like the Lightning (2016), Seven Surrenders (2017), The Will to Battle (2017), and Perhaps the Stars (2021). After three centuries of a global near-utopia, a minor crime and a miracle child begin to unravel the social system and lead the world to technologically-advanced total war. The first three books cover the events leading up to the war and the final book covers the war itself. The novels have won several awards, including a 2017 Compton Crook Award. The first novel was a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the series as a whole was a finalist for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Series.
Margaret the First is a fictional, historical biography written by Danielle Dutton, first published in 2016 by Catapult then by Scribe Publications later that year. Based on the historical figure of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Dutton weaves an imaginative story about the duchess's extraordinary life.
References
Paper bodies: a Margaret Cavendish reader. Ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000. ISBN1-55111-173-X
A digitization of the British Library's copy of The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1668 edition) is available at Google Books and the Internet Archive; both digital copies are indexed under the 1666 edition title Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy: To which is Added, the Description of a New Blazing World.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
